Understand the buyer personas of the audience who will be visiting your site, and create specific content around exactly what they’re looking for. Nobody wants to read content that’s too general because there’s no value in it. Content has to be interesting, engaging, and trigger some kind of emotion in the person reading it.

Greg’s second most important tip is to use basic SEO best practices when publishing your content. This includes title and description tags, heading tags, image alt tags and so on.

Mobile-friendliness has become a basic part of SEO, and Greg says this needs to be considered as well. Your content has to be easily viewable on all devices.

Greg’s third most important tip is to make sure you’re answering specific questions for Hummingbird. If you’re not answering your customer’s frequently asked questions, Google isn’t going to find your content.

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm looks at the meaning behind a query, rather than delivering search results based on matching a few key terms. If the meaning if your content doesn’t match what the user is looking for, Google is going to have a hard time finding it.

Murray Newlands

Murray is Deputy Editor at Search Engine Journal,Murray founded The Mail in 2013, an angel-funded startup publication covering performance marketing and mobile marketing. Murray is an advisor to a number of bay area startups including VigLink. In 2011 Wiley published his book Online Marketing: A User's Manual. Born in England, Murray moved to the USA in 2011 being recognized by the US government as "an alien of extraordinary ability". Murray co-authored Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals with Bruce Clay. Murray runs the agency Influence People bases in San Francisco.